Thread by @rckylrnts

My heart goes out to @lizzo because she really can’t do ANYTHING but apparently sing about how “confident” she is. This allows a certain group of people to pity her, confusing that for support, while another group uses her for their campaigns, confusing that for the same. 💔

There is a specter to the black femme body as it approaches a kind of “liminal attractiveness.” I know that’s clunkily-put. I’m trying to find ways to discuss parallels I see between fathpobia and transphobia, so you will excuse if I make some faux-pas as I think this aloud.

What do I mean by liminal attractiveness? I mean that the body before you in all ways, but one, does invite your appreciation. However, that critical one difference (whether real or, more often, imagined) is the crucial Door of No Passage.

The combo of being attracted (which is more a reflex reaction, than a preference — you honestly don’t get a choice typically what attracts you, and I don’t mean just sexually) and seeing that Door encourages real and immediate ire in the spectator. This ire takes many forms.

Let me be clear that I don’t suggest anyone is, actually, “liminally” (as in, it skirts that line) attractive—but rather that society (thru all the various -isms) produces the codes of not just beauty, but of carnality (& ergo sexuality) that demarcates these lines.

I will allegorize some personal examples from my life to try to make this clearer: often men, tho sometimes women, who are attracted to me spend the initial blunt of our meeting to inquire, however crudely or obliquely, about what’s between my thighs. I’ve been asked...

...if “I’ve had the surgery yet,” to am “all-the-way” or “fully” trans; the nicer ones will preface they “don’t want to be rude but...” and some cast it into the realm of speculative: “a girl as beautiful you just must”—must what? Have a vulva, sir?

In my jolliest moments, I have replied back with this pic below. In my lowest, I have scorned cis women who presume they know all and every aspect of what it is to be femme and woman (whereas many have told me I can I never know) & whom I know at least aint ever been asked this.

Always I am angry and annoyed by the (cis) men who have raised the question for many reasons. First of all, the very question from jump fetishizes me, implying that you only & immediately see me as a sexual object. This is the reality of sexism all femmes (trans or cis ) know.

But there ARE distinctions, & privilege wrapped up in these distinctions. For the cis femme shirking being objectified, she will yet never need to PROVE her femme ness, by way of a vulva or otherwise, to legitimize her being attractive, even if she does not return the affection.

This is when the Cis woman become “a bitch” or “slut,” but she is till a woman. See? Too often men (& let me be real clear here too—not every man, cuz, honey, I know I’m fine at and the boys know it too, whether they admit it or not 😌)—often men bait me with those invasive Qs...

...up top as to validate for themselves their own attraction. They couldn’t possibly be attracted to a femme without a vulva, you see, or they only allow themselves to see. (🗣NEVERMIND THE FACT THESE NIGGAS STAY LOCKED ON THE ASS—but I digress 😂) Ahem.They won’t allow it.

But the problem with this, sir or madam, is that you are ALREADY in my face, you are ALREADY in my DMs, you have already broken your whole neck trying to see me—ergo, you are ALREADY, quite literally, attracted to me. Bah humbug.

I have spent some describing these personal details to illustrate what I mean by “liminal” and that “Door of No Passage,” exactly: it’s a kind of no-woman’s land where, despite their beauty, you have to prove your carnality, or despite your carnality (in the example of Lizzie)...

...you have to prove your “beauty.” It’s an impossible land to live in, and it *is* a specifically different land that’s (I strongly assert) is the reality of most black cis and/or thin and/or conventionally right-bodied femme persons.

These lands may be, in reality, connected or even the same—but again society has erected these Border Walls, these binaries. And folks outrageously seek to protect those walls when challenged. This is precisely the reason you’ll find transphobia or fatphobia in anyone.

Cis people, including women, can be transphobic. Trans people can be transphobic. Thin people, including women, can be fatphobia, and fat people can be fatphobic. Moreover (and this is a lil messy lol) I’m often shocked that it’s never the cutest ones pushing these codes 👀..

I wonder sometimes if folks depend on trans & fatphobias because, w/out them, they imagine no other resource to their world:; that they immediately fall to “the bottom” of the heap without someone “lower” than them to project their insecurities and woes on. A supremacist’s logic.

Now I regard the optics of me trying these arguments. I am neither fat and I also enjoy other privileges to which beauty has been assigned. If I kill my voice and walk from the hips, I easily slip into a cis passing. Momentarily, I gain passage.

It is that moment you, whoever cis you reading this, most want to fuck me, be me. Or so I’ve gleaned. This all, too, simply brings my mind back to Lizz & the specter of the black fat femme body, a body that if she kill her voice, walk right, hit the right angles, etc, wins favor.

(I will defer to fat & hopefully also trans femme thinkers for possible things I’m not seeing as I make this conflation.) What I also wanna point to is how, when the voice does speak or the body walls HER OWN WAY, it’s the fire of that ire that returns, coming every which way.

The phobes do as we know they’ll do, but so too do the campaigners who have used your example, your brand, your public celebrity, as billboard for their cause, & like a billboard you shouldn’t move. You’re in impossible straits, that no-woman’s land again that can’t sustain.

Here is the part of the thread where I begin to cry because this is NOT LIVING. You cannot be to everyone else THEIR OWN PROOF, and stilly, my god, love your life and do your work. You can’t. You can’t.

Damned if you don’t contort to society’s diet on beauty and the carnal, damned if you do. Meanwhile, some of us are just here to sing! To write a poem! poets.org/poem/ode-fat

It will be difficult to lose in our impulse to be or not to be attracted, but we should quit in the interim in our minds these notions of the Door of No Passage. We should stop of even thinking of people as doors, as passage, as helpmeets, as meat. We should let people be free...

...We should let people be free but more than that, because freedom is the easy part, we should demand that people have sovereignty over THEIR OWN BODIES, their own lives.

Because, truth be told, it is that sovereignty over the self, which too often we simply reduce to “confidence;” it is that confidence of body and purpose, & seeking always to be ourselves, a person of character, despite society; it is society’s dogged insistence you are wrong...

...that you are wrong for this, but society NEVER winning, which eventually wins a person their attractiveness: and that’s precisely the reason you’re in our face, boo. That’s the reason—trans, fat, black or blue—we slay.

That’s all I got now, y’all. I’m a mess. 😭 I hope this helps. It’s afternoon, and I’m fixing me a drink cuz that helps. Productive dialogue and pushback welcome; all sad dissenters and every hater can just eat dirt & die, trash. Ciao. 🖤

Oh, P.S.: Something I didn’t quite make clear above is that I’m especially (&, tbh, always) thinking about INTRA-racial power dynamics: that is, black people w/& to black people. Clearly, as you move to inter-racial dynamics, the black femme body (of whatever form) is “suspect”.